Team Justice as a Consequence of Demographic Faultlines: Climate Level and Strength

Abstract

Team justice climate refers to group-level perceptions of fairness that teammates display toward one another. Despite its potential to promote performance, available empirical evidence is inconsistent and has remained in conceptual isolation from research on organizational climate and team-based models for analyzing group effectiveness. Hence, important questions have languished without an answer. First, organizational climate research suggests that climate strength, the extent to which team members share consensus as to their treatment, could moderate the effect of climate level, at least in some circumstances. If this is so, prior team justice research is misleading, given that climate strength has yet to be taken into account. Therefore, we examine whether the level (or amount) of team justice will have a greater effect on team performance to the extent that the climate is also strong. Second, despite the relevance of team inputs to better understand team processes, very little is known about the antecedents of team justice climate level and strength. This could be problematic as research on team effectiveness suggests that team faultlines, hypothetical dividing lines that may split a team into homogenous subgroups, can alter group processes and performance. Based on this research, we argue that demographic faultlines predict not only the climate level of team justice but also its strength. Two independent studies with teams from the healthcare industry showed that faultlines reduce the strength, but not the level, of team justice climate. These faultlines, in turn, lower the extent to which climate level translates into effective performance.